SHARE THIS POST:

Using Related Records to Help Segment a Marketing List

Marketing lists in CRM can be used to send communications to Lead, Contact, or Account records in the system, which is awesome, but can sometimes be limiting. Did you know that you can use records directly related to Leads, Contacts, or Accounts to add some depth to your marketing list queries? If not, you’ve come to the right place! In today’s blog we will show you how to use related records to help segment marketing lists in CRM.

Let’s look at an example where we want to build a marketing list for Accounts based on certain values in Opportunities related to Accounts. Maybe we want to create a targeted email blast for Accounts that have purchased bundles worth $20,000 or more of our marketing software in Q2 of this year. First, let’s look at all the closed Opportunity records we have for this year:

You can see the Opportunities we want to target boxed in red. We want exclude Accounts from the other Opportunities because they are either a) purchasing a software bundle other than marketing, b) made a marketing software purchase that is less than our $20,000 threshold, c) their purchase is outside our target date range of Q2 2016, or d) the Opportunity was lost instead of won. Now that we have an idea of what to expect in our marketing list, let’s go through the process of building it out.

In CRM, navigate to Marketing -> Marketing Lists and click the “New” button in the command bar.

There are three required fields when creating marketing lists: Name, which is the record name of the marketing list in CRM; List Type, which has us choose between “Static” where the list members must be manually updated or “Dynamic” where the list members automatically change based on changes to data in the CRM system; and Targeted At, which is where we dictate what type of record we want included in the marketing list (Lead, Contact, or Account). We’ll use the following values for our marketing list:

Be sure to save the marketing list record, and then we’ll be able to add members to the dynamic marketing list by clicking the “Manage Members” button in the command bar. If you’ve ever used Advanced Find in CRM, this screen will look very familiar. In this screen, we’ll essentially be setting queries for two different, but related, record types: Accounts and the related Opportunities.

For Accounts, we want to make sure that the Accounts are currently active, that they have an email address associated with them, and that they have consented to receive emails, so we’ll start with the following query:

Now on to the Opportunity portion of the query, which can be a little tricky to find. What we want to do for our next query value is to scroll down past the Field section:

Scroll to Related, which is where we’ll find the query fields for our Opportunity relationship with Accounts:

Once we’ve selected Opportunities as our related entity, we can start adding queries based on the field values from Opportunities. As stated above, we’re interested in a very particular sub-section of Opportunities for Accounts that have purchased at least $20,000 worth of Marketing Software in Q2 2016. We would use the below queries for the related Opportunities portion of our query:

With the combined Account and related Opportunity portions, our full dynamic marketing list query should look like this:

If we click the User Query button, we can see that the three Accounts we expected to see are reflected in our list members view:

Note: When creating a marketing list using related records, it’s important to know that results are shown when at least one of the related records meets our query criteria. An example of where a search like this wouldn’t apply would be if we wanted to create a marketing list for Accounts that haven’t had a won Opportunity since before a certain date. This search would still show Accounts that had won Opportunities after our specified date threshold if that Account had at least one previously won Opportunity that was before the date threshold. In short, these queries are best used in situations where we want to include any Lead/Contact/Account record whose related record meets our criteria rather than one where we may want to exclude some of those records if at least one of the related records do not meet our criteria.

If you keep the above in mind, you can add some extra complexity and flexibility to your marketing list segmentation! Now it’s time to take things a step further. Use your marketing lists to send great looking emails with PowerMailChimp. PowerMailChimp is a MailChimp CRM integration tool that connects the powerful, robust, and affordable third-party bulk email platform, MailChimp, with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Use static or dynamic CRM marketing lists to send out bulk emails such as newsletters, special offers, and more, all from within CRM.

Joe D365

Joe D365 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 superhero who runs on pure Dynamics adrenaline. As the face of PowerObjects, Joe D365’s mission is to reveal innovative ways to use Dynamics 365 and bring the application to more businesses and organizations around the world.

The integration of Adobe Campaign and Dynamics 365 allows your marketing team to personalize and segment your message based on your CRM data. Learn more in this blog!

PowerObjects, an HCL Technologies Company, is a leader in delivering Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions through unparalleled offerings of service, support, education and add-ons. Winner of the 2017 Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year Award for Dynamics 365 Consulting and Systems Integration, PowerObjects has built an unmatched team of Dynamics 365 experts that help organizations increase productivity, streamline business processes, and build better relationships.